January 28, 2023

6 tips for making the most of a tight IT budget

Having a clear vison of where you are and where you are going helps to put everything into perspective. As Madhumita Mazumder, GM-ICT at Australian tourism company Journey Beyond says, “If we have a proper strategic plan for the IT department that is aligned with the organization’s vision, we can achieve things within the budget and deal with half the problems that could arise six months or a year down the line.”?Giving an example of this approach, Mazumdar says, “We have got absolute clarity on pursuing a cloud-first strategy. The vision of having 100% cloud infrastructure enabled us to significantly reduce our third-party data center costs as we migrated it into our cloud environment.”?Similarly, Mazumdar is clear on the outsourcing versus insourcing debate. “I am a big fan of insourcing and support developing a team to take things in-house. For instance, having an in-house team ensures 100% patching of all my network devices on time. Patching happens at odd hours when the business isn’t operating.?

The developer role is changing radically, and these figures show how

"Today, developers are no longer just people building software for technology companies. They're an increasingly diverse and global group of people working across industries, tinkering with code, design, and docs in their free time, contributing to open source projects, conducting scientific research, and more," writes Dohmke. Also, the world's developers are no longer so highly concentrated in the US. GitHub has about 17 million users in the US, which is still its largest user base, but the service predicts India -- whose GitHub developer population stands at 10 million today -- will surpass the US by 2025. "They're people working around the world to build software for hospitals, filmmaking, NASA, and the PyTorch project, which powers AI and machine learning applications. They're also people who want to help a loved one communicate and family members overcome illnesses," Dohmke notes. On top of this, Microsoft's multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI is helping to attract new developers via services such as its paired programming coding assistant GitHub Copilot, which uses OpenAI's Codex to suggest coding solutions.?

Attackers move away from Office macros to LNK files for malware delivery

LNK abuse has been growing since last year, according to researchers from Cisco Talos, who have seen several attacker groups pivoting to it. One of those groups is behind the long-running Qakbot (also known as Qbot or Pinkslipbot) malware family. " Qakbot is known to evolve and adapt their operation according to the current popular delivery methods and defense techniques," the researchers said in a new report. "As recently as May 2022, their preferred method of distribution was to hijack email threads gathered from compromised machines, and insert attachments containing Office XLSB documents embedded with malicious macros. However, after Microsoft announced changes to how macros were executed by default on internet downloaded content, Talos found Qakbot increasingly moving away from the XLSB files in favor of ISO files containing a LNK file, which would download and execute the payload." However, LNK files have a lot of sections and contain a lot of metadata about the machines that generated them, leaving unique traces that can be associated with certain attack campaigns or attacker groups.

What developers should do during a downturn

Particularly if you have worked only at one company for a long while, it may be time to “upskill” yourself. There are more ways than ever to do this. While there are a lot of expensive so-called boot camps, these are lean times, and frankly, some of them are predatory. Consider self-study using MOOCs like Coursera, Udemy, Saylor, and EdX. These have university-style courses that are free or low-cost. If you are early in your career, you can now get a certification or even a bachelor’s degree in computer science entirely online. Both the University of London and BITS Pilani offer bachelor’s programs on Coursera. (A number of other schools offer master’s programs.) However, MOOCs are not the only game in town. Your local university is also getting in on the game and may offer completely online courses. Having done this recently, my advice is not to bother with a formal degree if you are already a seasoned professional, unless you are switching fields. Universities have a lot of “money” courses they make you take in which you fulfill “requirements” but in which you learn nothing of any value whatsoever.?

How Smarter Data Management Can Relieve Tech Supply Chain Woes

As data volumes have exploded in the last few years – primarily from growing unstructured data volumes such as user files, video, sensor data and images – it is no longer viable to have a one-size-fits-all data management strategy. Data needs will always change unpredictably over time. Organizations need a way to continually monitor data usage and move data sets to where they need to be at the right time. This is not just a metrics discussion but requires regular communication and collaboration with departments. What are the new requirements for compliance, security and auditing? What about analytics needs in the coming quarter and year? This information helps all IT departments optimize decisions for ongoing data management while still keeping costs and capacity in mind. For instance, by knowing that the R&D team always wants their data available for retesting for up to three months after a project, IT can keep it on the NAS for 90 days and then move it to a cloud data lake for long-term storage and potential cloud machine learning or artificial intelligence analysis.?

Best practices for migrating unstructured data

The quality of your data will have a direct impact on how successful your migration is. To assess data quality, you should first examine the data’s structure. You’ll need to ensure that all data is properly organized, labeled and formatted. You should also examine any external factors that affect data quality, such as errors in source files or duplicate entries. Once you have evaluated the data’s structure, you should look for any possible inconsistencies. Check for incorrect spelling, typos and any other errors that could affect the accuracy of your migration. You should also ensure that all data is up-to-date and accurate. It is critical to ensure that your unstructured data complies with applicable laws, regulations and industry standards such as HIPAA, GDPR, GxP, PCI-DSS and SOX. To maintain compliance at all stages, you’ll need to ensure that the data migration process meets all relevant requirements for the laws that apply to your business. To begin, make sure you have the right security measures to protect data in transit and storage. This might include encryption at rest and in transit as well as other technical safeguards.

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